A Field Study on the Use of Process Mining of Event Logs as an Analytical Procedure in Auditing
利用全球银行的采购数据，展示了事件日志流程挖掘作为新型分析程序在审计中的价值，能发现传统审计未检测到的异常交易，如未经批准的付款和职责分离违规。
ABSTRACT There is a large body of accounting research literature examining the use of analytical procedures by auditors and proposing either new types of analytical procedures or more effective ways of implementing existing procedures. In this paper, we demonstrate—using procurement data from a leading global bank—the value added in an audit setting of a new type of analytical procedure: process mining of event logs. In particular, using process mining, we are able to identify numerous transactions that we consider to be audit-relevant information, including payments made without approval, violations of segregation of duty controls, and violations of company-specific internal procedures. Furthermore, these identified anomalies were not detected by the bank's internal auditors when they conducted their examination of that same data using conventional audit procedures, thus establishing the benefits of using process mining to complement existing audit methods. Process mining is a very different approach to evidence collection and analysis as it does not focus on the value of transactions and its aggregations, but on the transactional processes themselves. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of process mining in an audit context, this paper also discusses the contributions that process mining can make both to accounting research and auditing practice.